Nathan DunnNathan is an Elite Application Engineer for GoEngineer who has worked for the SOLIDWORKS reseller channel since 2005. Prior to that, he designed rolling equipment where he gained extensive hands on experience with Large Assembly Best Practices, Sheet Metal, Weldments, PDM, and machining. He was recently awarded the Elite Applications Engineer award from SOLIDWORKS as confirmation of his extensive knowledge of the entire SOLIDWORKS product line. « Less

Nathan DunnNathan is an Elite Application Engineer for GoEngineer who has worked for the SOLIDWORKS reseller channel since 2005. Prior to that, he designed rolling equipment where he gained extensive hands on experience with Large Assembly Best Practices, Sheet Metal, Weldments, PDM, and machining. He was … More »

Design without worrying about the process

Dare to dream: collaborative design with socially connected projects that facilitate design iteration. Wouldn’t that be nice? I know that I could have personally benefited from this concept numerous times. Today we will answer some of the questions that I know a lot of you will have, because I had them myself.

Let’s start with the basics. What is the 3DEXPERIENCE? I have heard several people refer to it as the Facebook for SOLIDWORKS users. There is something to that, but not in the way that you might think. Facebook has forever changed the way that we interact with our social groups. In a similar way, the 3DEXPERIENCE is going to change the way that we interact and work as design teams. You probably won’t see videos of cats jumping into walls in the 3DEXPERIENCE unless, of course, your company designs cat retention systems.

3DEXPERIENCE is a platform that allows users to interact with task specific apps, update colleagues, and capture other ideas as they happen.

Have you ever had what you thought was a great idea to solve a problem in an existing design project? Time and again, we sketch the idea on a whiteboard/napkin, discuss why it will or won’t work with some peers, and then decide to go another direction. How often have you had the same or a similar idea on another project, and you have to go through the whole process again to determine if it might work this time? What if you could store not only the conversation, but the initial sketches and mechanism design in a digital way that could be repurposed later for another project?

Imagine a system where ideas can be searched and found based upon the 6-W’s – who, what, when, where, why & how (There is a W in hoW). 3DEXERIENCE allows you to archive sketches, models, blog posts, wiki questions, messages and so much more. Finding pieces of your idea is easy with tags and imbedded metadata.

SOLIDWORKS Mechanical Conceptual is the first app being offered to the SOLIDWORKS user base. It is a CAD tool that allows you to capture multiple concepts in a single modeling environment. The single modeling environment is a revolutionary step in how we draw stuff. It allows you to focus on the mechanics of how your design works and think less about the documentation structure. Think about how much more fun it might be to actually design innovative products without worrying about manipulating the process.

This platform is built on four pillars: Conceptual, Instinctive, Social, and Connected. We will continue to explore how these pillars apply to 3DEXPERIENCE and SOLIDWORKS Mechanical Conceptual in two additional posts.

If you would like to see how this platform might benefit you and your organization, sign up for one of our regional What’s Next events, where we are asking the question “What’s next for you?”